No Rest for the Weary
by A. X. Zanier
Summary: Steve contemplates his choices post CA:CW
Author: A. X. Zanier

Title: _No Rest for the Weary_

Rating: PG-13 (language)

Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or basic story ideas to _Captain America_ or any of the MCU properties. Any additional characters or story ideas are mine.

Spoilers: Minor ones for Civil War and the MCU in general.

.

.

No Rest for the Weary

.

.

I can't sleep.

Nothing new, really. It's been that way since I woke up from the ice. Getting a harder mattress, like Sam had suggested, helped for while, but disturbing dreams always seemed to return and nothing would banish them until I'd worked through the problem and found some sort of peace with it.

This time it's Tony haunting me and even though I'm now awake and staring at the blank ceiling over my bed, I still see his eyes.

That look of true terror as I slammed the shield down at him. Yes, I could have easily taken his head off, with my bare hands even, but that had never been my intent. I'd needed to stop him, but he'd been in that damn suit, and while Tony would be comparatively easy to put down, he'd never been much of a fighter on his best day, the suit would always be far harder to stop. Damaging the power source had been the only real option, but he hadn't thought it through that far, we'd been too deep into the melee to do more than run on gut instinct.

Iron Man is a blunt instrument, the wearer makes it dangerous, but Tony, while smart, was not, in his own words, a soldier.

I had years of wartime living to become a master of tactics and flying by the seat of my pants, so while the fight had been violent, I had not been acting on instinct alone and when the opportunity had presented itself, had taken out the arc reactor that powered the suit. My only intent to give me and Bucky time to get away.

But that look in his eyes, the one that had kept me from sleeping since it had happened… he had truly believed that I would kill him to save Bucky.

And I can't say I wouldn't have.

I sit up, sliding back and crushing the too soft pillows into the headboard, rubbing my face in my hands in exhaustion.

I had warned Tony, that bright, sunny day on Clint's farm, that I had a dark side and he finally got to see it in all its disturbing glory.

The hell of it was that if the situation had been reversed, if Bucky had gone after Tony with the same fervor, I would have done exactly the same; done everything in my power to stop Bucky and protect Tony.

And for the most simple of reasons: Tony is my friend.

I'm not entirely certain when that occurred, but it had. Much like with his father, who I could not stand at first given his, to my eyes anyway, disrespect of women and flippant attitude at life, there seemed to no way I could ever come to respect the man, much less like him.

Yet both happened.

The events of New York, how they ended really, I think is what opened the door. Tony Stark, ever out for himself and his ego, threw it all away in an effort to save _everyone_. Something I had not thought him possible of just mere hours before. I really thought he cared nothing about anyone other than himself and yet he'd literally given everything short of his life that day.

In the aftermath, when we'd sat around a table in a partially destroyed Shwarma shop, I first realized that this man, this egotistical, womanizing, one-percenter had the potential to become a man I could call friend.

And I will do everything in my power to protect a friend.

I guess that includes standing up to them when they are wrong.

Wrong about the Accords. Wrong about Bucky. Wrong about me, maybe. Maybe I wasn't what this world needed, no matter what Fury had led me to believe.

Do I blame Tony for his emotional response?

No, I would probably have reacted similarly in the same situation, I can't deny that, especially given the damage I had done to Hydra after Bucky had fallen from that train and been killed as far as I had known.

I had taken every single moment of that loss, guilt and blame out on those who fought for Hydra. The Howling Commandos and I did incredible damage in the name of liberty, but most of it, there at the end anyway, had been about payback. It turned out I could be very methodical about it.

I threw off the covers in my bare feet and borrowed pajamas, the plush rug muffling my footsteps as I stalked the breadth of the extravagant room that had been given to me freely and with no strings of which I had become aware. I could be reasonably certain there would be none, but these days I always looked over my shoulder and expected the worst.

How could I trust dozens of countries to not want to use the Avengers for their own agendas?

There were days I hadn't trusted us, not the people per se, but the intel. In this day and age faking up intel was a simple task that even children could accomplish with ease.

Hydra had hidden within SHIELD for _decades_ with no one the wiser. The most powerful security agency on the planet had been nothing but a huge lie, had recruited me with an ease the Red Skull would have laughed at. His legacy leading to the events that had played out little over a week ago and left the Avengers torn to shreds.

I had no clue where Natasha had ended up. Sam and Wanda, like myself, were guests here in Wakanda. Scott went back to San Francisco, I think. Clint most likely went back to his farm and family. Smart man. Smarter than all of us most days.

I would offer my help to SHIELD, but what remained of it was a tiny, damaged thing that fought more with itself than protecting those in the world at large.

And, let's be honest here, I was afraid to make overtures to only end up being used again.

Which is why we, The Avengers, had struck out on our own in the first place. Deciding ourselves where the overwhelming power we possessed could and should be used. Cleaning up the mess left behind after D.C. took up a lot of our time the last year or so. Dealing with Rumlow and his cronies had been a necessity, the damage done in Lagos unplanned and unintentional, but, yes, our fault.

That bomb would have done as much, if not more, damage on the ground as it had in the air, and we would still have been blamed, never mind we had prevented a potential biological weapon of mass destruction from falling into the hands of those who would have used it for their own goals.

D.C. all over again only with disease and not armed helicarriers doing the targeting and killing.

I muttered imprecations under my breath, unable to stop my mind from wandering down the same worn paths over and over again.

I had gone over the events leading up to my exile far too many times already. Probed and examined and worn over every instant and while I could see moments where things might have gone differently, it was far too late to change anything. Those deeds were done and had led to here.

Yet every time I closed my eyes the first thing I still saw was that moment of terror in Tony's.

That one instant above all the others preventing me from finding some sort of peace.

I'd made my overture, whether or not Tony would accept it... I suppose I will find out when my phone rings.

If it rings.

I chose one friend over another and I know that hurt Tony more than any of the punches I had thrown.

Zemo had done his job incredibly well, planned and baited and led us by the nose right into the trap he had set.

I felt horrible for Tony, who had come to us when realizing I had been right all along, only to have his world shattered by ninety seconds of video.

The Winter Soldier had killed his parents and I had known about it.

I saw our friendship crumble to dust in his eyes the instant I admitted that.

I would have helped Tony kill the Winter Soldier.

I could not let him kill Bucky.

And Tony, heartbroken and destroyed Tony, could not see the difference.

And maybe never would.

Christ, I really needed to talk to Bucky, and while I technically could, the conversation would end up being fairly one-sided.

With a heavy sigh I walked over to the desk, turned the computer on, settled down in the ergonomically correct chair, which I hated, and stared at the screen blankly for long minutes, not certain what to do. I'd adapted to the tech readily enough, but could not seem to spend hours surfing the net the way most seemed to do these days. Any projects I'd been working on at the compound would be inaccessible from here and would give away my location so I knew better than to even try hacking into the servers there.

Cat videos did not interest me and while I had learned quite a bit about world history since I'd been thawed, I now did not necessarily believe what I read. And not a just from a history is written by the winners perspective, but because Hydra had its tentacles dug in deep everywhere and while most of the heads had been cut off, many remained would still be working towards their goal.

So I checked my sure to be empty email, a simple 1918 , that no one would believe belonged to Captain America, which meant I was free to use it as needed.

There wasn't much given my lack of an online presence. Me on Facebook, that would be unnecessary to say the least. A couple of spam emails. A few newslettesr for World War II veterans, and one with a return address I did not recognize. I double clicked it to reveal a short note: _I thought this might be of interest to you_.

No clue as to who it had come from so I warily clicked on the first attachment. Some program deemed it safe to open and I did.

Inside were scans of files, all in Russian which I did not know very well, but could read enough of without using GoogleTranslate to get the gist of the contents.

I sat back feeling shock more than anything. This was the file that had destroyed the Avengers far more than the Accords ever could. The December 1991 Hydra file that detailed the deaths of the Stark's.

I went back to the email in a vain effort to glean any information on where it had come from, but while good, I was not Nat or Sharon, and definitely not Tony and his Gal Friday, any of whom could press a few buttons and know instantly where it came from.

I gave a cursory glance at the other attachments; the Red Book, which would be useful in deprogramming Bucky, and the various videos showing the Winter Soldier's mission from a variety of revealing angles.

Going back to the original files; I would give a copy of the Red Book to Bucky's doctors in the morning, no point in waking them as he would be going nowhere for the time being, I began to go over over them in detail, certain there would be something of great import buried within, else why send it to me?

Bucky would have been helpful here as well as my grasp or Russian was not a fluent as I preferred and his most certainly was, though it hadn't been the last time I'd known him. Nat had been teaching me, but it been more for fun than anything, so I could ask all kinds of tourist questions, but not read detailed Hydra files. So internet translators it would be.

I could probably best guess most of it, the language fairly straightforward and not as complicated as others I had learned, but I let the translator do it's work as it read the pages and did it's best to turn the scrawling Russian handwriting into Arial twelve point English.

I could have taken the time to do the opposite, found a site to teach me the language as I had several times the last few years, but didn't feel like working that hard at the moment. I'd taught myself any number of new and exciting skills since I woke up. Had to. The world had changed far too much since I'd been turned into a Capsicle as Tony had become ever so fond of calling me.

Luckily, I learn rather quickly and forget nothing.

See, even as a scrawny kid from Brooklyn, I hadn't been dumb by any stretch of the imagination, I would have been dubbed a nerd or geek in today's slang, but then I'd simply been bully bait. Stubborn, foolish bully-bait, but still the one who ended up bloody and broken on the ground _every single time_.

I never had liked bullies.

Still didn't.

Which is part of the reason I'd balked at signing the Accords. They'd been shoved at us with no time to do more than glance through the hundreds of pages in lawyer-ese complete with ultimatum - sign or retire.

Bullies in fancy suits and uniforms.

And while I hadn't expected anyone to stand beside me I didn't mind those who had chosen to. I don't know what they saw when they looked at me, but I knew I would do my best to honor their choice and defend it and them as needed.

There were days I caught my reflection and still did not recognize the face and body there. More often than not I still saw that scrawny barely sixteen year old, on his own for the first time in his life, fading bruises here and there from yet another scrape I'd gotten into and that Bucky had pulled me out of.

See, even with all the friends I'd made in this new life, I still did not fit in. My worldview still skewed to that of the early twentieth century, not that of the twenty-first. Oh, I'd adapted reasonably well, but still felt out of step with the times.

Which is why when I had the chance to get Bucky back I grasped onto it like a lifeline. No one... literally no one I currently knew could understand what I'd been through, was still going through except him. We'd literally walked through hell during the war and yet during it all he'd still treated me as his best friend. Granted, he didn't have to pick me up off the ground after another beating quite as often, but he'd had my back through thick and thin... up until the day he died.

Yes, I guess you could say he was my weakness, especially now, but he was also the one person on the planet who would understand my gripes, who I could talk to about the differences between then and now. The only one who might still understand me and that, deep inside, I was still a short, scrawny, asthmatic who always seemed to choose the wrong moment to stand up against the bullies of this world.

And I needed that.

Needed someone, anyone to see _Steve Rogers_ and not Captain America the super soldier who was too stubborn to die when sacrificing his life for God and Country. And the girl.

Let's not forget the girl.

I never would.

I forced those depressing thoughts away quickly. I would miss Peggy for the rest of my sure to be long life, the first woman who had looked at Steve Rogers and see what he could be. I don't _know_ that she would have dated pre-serum me, but I'd like to believe she might have.

I needed a purpose to keep going now that the Avengers were no longer an option.

Fury had kept saying the world needed me and my brand of heroism, but I had yet to see the truth of it.

Everyone wanted a savior, but no one wanted to pay the price for it.

Everyone wanted a bad guy to blame and point fingers at, but no one wanted to stand up to them.

Not really.

So I did.

And I paid the price.

Exiled.

Alone.

Disavowed.

I pounded a fist into the desktop in my frustration then sighed as I became aware of the sizable dent I had put into the steel surface.

After all this time and I still could not manage to remember my own strength.

Guess I'm still used to be strong on the inside only. How many hits did I take over the last few years that would have killed a normal human, would have utterly destroyed any of those that had been fighting by my side, and I simply groaned, got up and waded back into the fray?

I was not normal, better perhaps, if you believed Erskine, but most certainly no longer the definition of normal.

Yet, another thing only Bucky could relate to.

I focused back on the computer screen, enough of the pages done for me to start looking over them and it didn't take long for me to discover that while the Stark's had been killed they had not been the targets. No, something in the trunk of the car had been the real target. The Winter Soldier had gone there first, and only killed the Stark's because the original car crash had not.

That item had then been taken to that Russian facility and used to create...

Clearly I'd been hit in the head harder than I'd thought if it had taken me this long to put the pieces together.

Five super soldiers had been created mere weeks after the original Winter Soldier had been sent on that mission, ones that were purportedly even stronger than him.

And that meant... that meant only one thing.

Howard Stark had recreated the serum.

Shit.

In the back of my mind I could hear Tony's voice saying, "Language," which caused a tiny smile to twtich my lips upwards.

Somewhere in the old files Tony had inherited lay the secret to create yet more super soldiers and I seriously doubt he had any idea.

Oh, once he cooled down and could look at the events of 1991 dispassionately he would realize the same thing.

And I had no idea what he would do with that knowledge.

 _._

 _._

 _._

 _finis_


End file.
